Dead Time (25 page)

Bee Bee looked round. Rose caught her eye. She'd never spoken to Bee Bee face to face and yet it seemed as though she knew her.
I saw you run across that bridge
, she thought, staring straight at her. Bee Bee turned back
to face the stage. Lewis Proctor glanced round at her but made no sign that he saw her there.

Was it Bee Bee who made that call to Emma?

One of the girls started to read from a piece of paper. She read slowly but quietly so it was hard to hear every word she said. Rose stopped trying and pulled her rucksack on to her lap and opened the pouch at the front. In it she saw the pink mobile, still in the plastic bag where Skeggsie had placed it. She pulled it out and slid it out of the bag. She flipped the lid and turned it on, making sure it was on
silent
.

There was a way to try and find out the identity of the caller.

Make a call on Emma's phone.

Reply to the text that was sent to Emma.

Just about everyone who had any link to Emma was in the auditorium at that moment.

The principal was standing up. Her voice rang clear and loud after the nervous girls and the tearful aunt.

‘I would like you all to take part in a minute's silence.'

The silence was solid. Everyone in the auditorium went very still. Rose looked down at the tiny screen and typed out a text.

Who are you?

She waited until the end of the silence. The principal thanked everyone and the classical music started again. A low buzz of conversation began and she pressed
Send
. She
kept her eyes on Bee Bee and was disappointed when no sound came. Then she remembered that all phones were on
silent.
She waited as bit by bit people took their phones out of bags and pockets and began to look at them. The conversation got louder and she was worried that she wouldn't hear a tone as the text arrived. Her eyes stayed on Bee Bee, who had taken her phone out of her pocket and was staring at it.

Rose got up and walked a couple of steps down towards the stage. Now she was close enough to Bee Bee to hear a ring tone.

She sent the text a second time.
Who are you?

She waited.

Bee Bee's ring tone sounded. Bee Bee looked at the screen and she heard her swear softly. Rose stood very still. She'd been
right
. She'd seen Bee Bee's silver boots and bangles on the bridge and now she had proof that it was Bee Bee's phone that made the call.

A sound came from the other side of the auditorium. A wailing sound. A loud cry. She turned round and saw Emma's family huddling around Sherry Baxter. Sherry was sobbing loudly and trying to shrug off her relatives. Rose looked at her with pity. Sherry had felt the loss badly. She had been crying at Ricky Harris's memorial, then at the rose garden and now here.

‘Leave it, please, leave it,' Sherry shouted out through her tears, backing away from her relatives towards the doors of the auditorium.

She went out and was followed by some of the adults. Looking round Rose saw that Bee Bee was heading down the stairs towards the exit. She went after her, sidestepping students who were dawdling. Emma's family had congregated in the foyer but Sherry had gone outside into a small courtyard. She had a lit cigarette in one hand and her mobile phone in the other. She was walking up and down, her body language warding sympathisers off. Her face was blotched and she kept wiping her nose with the hand that held the cigarette.

Bee Bee was heading for the toilets. Rose followed her, one hand in her pocket holding on to Emma's phone. There was a short queue inside and Bee Bee was at the front. Rose was two girls behind her. She wished she could see Bee Bee's face, to see if there was any sign of upset. She would make the call one more time to make sure she was right. She'd wait until Bee Bee went into the cubicle and then send the text for a third time.

‘Hey, Rose,' a voice said.

A girl from one of her classes were standing behind her in the queue. Rose gave a half-smile. Her name was Zoe something. She really couldn't get involved in a conversation with her now. She wanted to keep her concentration on the phone text and Bee Bee.

‘Did you see that scene from Sherry!' Zoe said. ‘Talk about drama! I call it hypocritical.'

Rose frowned. One of the toilets flushed and a door opened. Bee Bee went into the cubicle. Rose took the phone out of her pocket. Turning her back on the girls she accessed the text she'd composed earlier.

‘All those tears and she was sneaking off behind Emma's back. Cow. How could she do that her stepsister?'

Rose turned round to face Zoe. She had half an ear to the cubicle and was going to press the
Send
button any second.

‘What are you talking about?'

‘Sherry and all her blubbering. I saw her snogging Ricky Harris a couple of weeks before he was stabbed. Behind her stepsister's back! She was all over him. It was up Canary Wharf. I didn't have any classes so I went there with my mum to look at the shops.'

‘Sherry and Ricky?'

‘On the escalator. We were going up. And they were coming down.'

The sound of a toilet flushing distracted Rose. The other cubicle door opened and the queue moved forward.

Sherry and Ricky Harris? Together? Behind Emma's back?

Moments later Bee Bee emerged, the door banging behind her. Rose found herself staring at her. She'd still not sent the text. She'd been thrown by a mental picture of Sherry's red hair and Ricky Harris's face. Together. She was astonished.

‘What's your problem, girl?' Bee Bee demanded.

Rose couldn't say anything. In her hand was Emma's mobile. Bee Bee's eyes were boring into her. She looked down at the phone and pressed the
Send
button. Bee Bee made a loud
tsk
ing sound and shoved past her. She went out of the toilets.

Rose followed her. She pressed the
Send
button and watched Bee Bee walk back up to Lewis Proctor. She waited for her to get her phone out and receive the text for the fourth time.

But she didn't reach for her phone. She didn't pat her pocket to feel it vibrating. She smiled up at Lewis, her phone of no interest to her. Rose felt her shoulders slump. She'd been wrong. It had just been a coincidence. Bee Bee's phone had rung at the very moment she had sent the text.

Someone else had received it.

Another phone had got the message
Who are you?
Four times.

She swivelled round and looked through the glass window at Sherry Baxter, who was standing in the middle of the courtyard staring at her mobile phone.

Rose pulled out the pink handset. Instead of sending a text she rang the number at the top of the screen. She waited, hardly breathing, and moments later Sherry's face creased up as she looked at her own phone. She pressed a button and lifted the phone to her ear.

Rose put Emma's phone to her ear.

There was silence for a moment, then a voice.

‘Who is this? You have the wrong number. You have to stop calling me.'

As she listened she looked out at Sherry, whose lips were synching the words.

‘Stop calling me,' she said and the call was ended.

Sherry Baxter threw her cigarette to the ground and then walked off out of the courtyard. Rose waited a few moments, her chest puffed up with indignation. Emma's stepsister. How could she?

Then she followed her.

Rose kept her distance. She let Sherry Baxter walk ahead and stopped a couple of times to look in shop windows in case she caught up with her. Sherry went past the train station and headed for the bus stop. The High Street was crowded with students from the school but Sherry just walked ahead, not acknowledging any of them. She stopped when she got to the bus shelter and Rose turned into a shop. The window was full of sari fabric, dazzling colours, swathes of it hanging side by side, jewellery stacked along the lower portion. Rose saw rows of bangles, hundreds of them. She thought of Bee Bee.

Why was she running across the bridge on the night that Emma was murdered?

Rose looked round. Sherry was in the shelter waiting for a bus. She had her mobile in her hand. Rose registered then that Sherry was dressed from head to toe in black, in mourning for her stepsister. The colour
of her hair seemed to contradict the emotion. It sat glossy and bright, one side held stylishly back by a black comb.

She and Ricky Harris had been seen together.

How could that be? How could Sherry deceive her stepsister so?

A bus was coming. It edged forward through the traffic and Rose could see that Sherry was standing forward, intending to get on it. She walked a few metres, keeping herself to the inside of the pavement, hoping that Sherry didn't turn suddenly and see her there. The bus stopped and Sherry moved forward. The doors took a while to open and when they did she stepped up on to the platform, followed by some other students and a couple of men in workmen's clothes. Rose moved closer to the stop as Sherry walked further into the bus. Then Sherry went upstairs. Rose stepped quickly across to the bus stop and on to the bus. She showed her travel card and then headed along the bus to the very back. She sat in the corner opposite a big woman and a toddler. From where she was she could see the foot of the stairs.

It was about six stops to Parkway East.

Sherry would get off there and head down Cuttings Lane towards the Chalk Farm Estate.

The bus moved off and she sat back. It stuttered forward and then stopped, waiting for a car to pull out from a parking place.

Why was she doing this? It would be enough to simply tell the police what she had found out. They knew where Sherry lived. They would go and see her, question her about the call to Emma. But Rose didn't feel happy about that. Sherry had made this personal by shouting Rose down at Ricky Harris's memorial. She had shamed her in front of all the other students by saying that she hadn't got to the cemetery in time to help Emma, that she hadn't bothered, when all the time she had sent the message that had made Emma go in earlier than she had planned.

There was another reason. Rose had seen Sherry answer the call and she didn't want to let her out of her sight. The events of the last couple of weeks had been fragmented and blurred. It had been impossible to get a clear picture of what had happened either on Parkway East station or in St Michael's Cemetery. Rose had found something out now and she wasn't going to let it go until she understood what had happened on those two occasions when she had stood over someone's dead body.

She was staying with Sherry.

As the bus stopped and started she remembered Sherry's tears at Ricky's memorial. Then she had thought they were for her stepsister but she had been wrong. Sherry was crying for Ricky Harris. Maybe she had been the only person in school who had cried for Ricky. Possibly she had loved him.

How long had she been seeing him?

Was it just during the summer when Emma had broken up with him? Did she fall for Ricky and convince herself that Ricky felt the same way? Then when Emma broke up with Lewis and went back to Ricky did that mean that she was out of the picture? Or did Ricky keep on seeing Sherry at the same time as he was seeing her stepsister.

Either way Sherry must have felt spurned.

Rose remembered the call Ricky had got on the platform that night he was killed.
Change of plans. Got to meet someone
, he'd said. Had that call been from Sherry? Was it possible that Sherry had been so broken-hearted that she had followed Ricky to the station and watched him talking to Rose from the footbridge? Had that made her even more jealous? Perhaps it was bad enough that he'd dumped her and gone back to his old girlfriend, Emma, but here he was looking as though he was chatting up someone else. Most certainly Sherry would have known where Ricky kept his knife. She'd argued with him on the footbridge. Had she slid her hand into his pocket, taken his knife and stabbed him with it?

Rose thought about this dispassionately. Ricky's death meant nothing to her. Emma was different, though. She didn't want to think about that night at the cemetery.

The bus was finally coming into Parkway East. Rose moved herself and slid down the seat a touch as she saw Sherry's feet appear at the bottom of the stairs. She picked
up a newspaper that was on the seat beside her. She held it up in front of her face.

The bus stopped and the doors opened. A crowd of people were queuing to get on and off and Rose waited until Sherry stepped off the bus before she got up, dropped the newspaper, and followed her.

She waited a moment and let Sherry to walk ahead, across the road towards Cuttings Lane. A couple of other teenage girls were walking behind her and Rose let a gap open up. She allowed Sherry to get out of sight because Cuttings Lane only led to one place. When she got to the footbridge she glanced down at the railway. The knife that had killed Emma had been found down there alongside the track. She looked ahead and saw, in the distance, the red hair of Sherry in front of the other teenage girls.

She went across the footbridge and down the stairs and on to a pathway that had murals on each side. She moved quickly, worrying that Sherry would disappear off in the streets and cul-de-sacs of the estate. She kept to the side of the pavement and saw Sherry turn right up ahead. She quickened her step, passing the other two girls, and got to the corner just as a door shut.

She didn't know which door it was. She stood perplexed and looked at a row of four houses in front of her. There were other houses further along but Sherry couldn't have walked that quickly.

‘You lost?' one of the girls said, walking up to her.

‘I was trying to catch up with Sherry,' she said.

‘Number twenty-two. The end house. You from her school?'

Rose nodded.

‘I was going to go to college,' the other girl said.

‘You was going to do childcare.'

‘I didn't get the grades.'